I’ve read that Delta is starting to base ticket prices on AI analysis of what the customer might be willing to pay. Does anyone here have a deeper analysis of how this will work? How much more or less will the fares be? If through AI the airline knows I am flying to my kid’s graduation for example am I going to pay more than someone who has flexible dates? Will the airline know that I have already booked a tour or a cruise and charge more? Will they charge more if they know that you have a good credit score or that you pay your credit cards on time?
Getting the best airfare is going to get more complicated.
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Interesting and not surprising. There was just a study that showed airlines charge solo travelers more than a reservation that would be for 2+. Exclusive: US Airlines Are Quietly Hitting Solo & Biz Travelers with Higher Fares
I know some people are using AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to help find lowest priced flights, but I don’t know the details and the proper prompts…maybe it’s possible to beat the airlines at their game? There are also specific AI flight planning front ends too, like this one (but I haven’t used it yet): Free AI Flight Planner: Plan Your Trip With Ease
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Early research on personalized pricing isn’t favorable for the consumer. Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options.
The personal information that was harvested from Federal systems is ripe for misuse if it ends up being sold to companies. This is one example of how our personal information can be used essentially against us.
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Once a year I fly Delta One to Europe. I hope that doesn’t mean they will quote me a higher price for domestic economy.
I think concert tickets too.
It’s going to takeover our lives.
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Between wild pricing and Ticketmaster-type fees and platforms, we rarely attend concerts anymore. We limit it to concerts our friends have invited us to that aren’t very pricey, or to an artist we are just determined to see.
We were all excited to see that Ethel Cain would be performing near us, then couldn’t believe the general admission tickets were so expensive since she’s not well-known. We would have loved to go but couldn’t justify the price to stand outside in a mob.
Our Steven Wilson tickets (better known and a real favorite) with excellent seats were the same price and seemed expensive enough. It’s a shame, especially since I see a lot of tickets unsold for concerts that I would attend if they were cheaper.
I saw Elton John on his last tour for $60, and it would have been well worth a much higher price! Prices are all over the place.
I wonder if AI will make concert tickets worse. Too much to hope that it might improve it?
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Some states require companies to clear disclose they are using personal information for pricing of their products.
- New York: Requires businesses using “personalized algorithmic pricing” to disclose this fact to consumers. It also prohibits using certain data associated with protected characteristics to set prices if it leads to different prices for different groups.
- California: The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants consumers rights to know what personal information is collected about them and to opt out of its sale. While not directly regulating pricing, it can impact how businesses use and sell data that could be used for personalized pricing.
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I see live music at least once a week (ranging from big mainstream artists to the many low cost/free concerts at Northwestern University.) I hate ticketmaster with a passion, and their ‘surge’ pricing (or whatever they call it.) I can often ultimately find prices much lower on the secondary market than the peak initial pricing. Especially as the concert gets closer and closer. (I doubt this strategy would work for Beyonce or Taylor Swift, but they are the exceptions.)
There are some other platforms besides Ticketmaster, like AXS, but they aren’t awesome either. AXS kept kicking me out of the system yesterday as I was trying to buy Robert Plant tix because it thought I was a bot (literally gave me that message, suggested I go off wifi and on data.) And I wasn’t doing anything like having multiple pages open on multiple browsers etc. Frustrating, but I did get tix.
Interestingly it was for Robert Plant’s NYC concert that I was talking about above, and I did get a message that said something like ‘prices are higher than face due to demand’…and this was right at the time the tickets went on sale. I wonder if my price was more or less than others’? Makes me mad.
Staying on topic with the thread, I hope that with the flights that AI can help the consumer even as the airlines might be trying to use AI as Delta is.
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I just bought concert tix that were $95 for $49
Doobies from $80 to $30 - guess not selling so Live Nation put on$30 sale.
Paul McCartney playing a 4500 theater in Nashville - well over $1k. Dang I had two extra seats for him in Winston Salem a few years back and no one bought on resale. I ate them.
Pricing is out of control but also adjusts which I hate. And they set the resale price.
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Uggghhhh…this is enough to make me start using my incognito tab all the time.
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Yes! And not be signed into your airline/hotel/priceline/etc account!
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Tbh, none of this helps. You don’t need to be logged in for them to know who you are. There are various ways to get around this. Ad networks also builds a profile across multiple websites. Incognito mode helps to some extent but it doesn’t make you invisible - you can still be tracked.
These are not conspiracy theories - I work in tech and I know what can be done and know for a fact that consumer facing sites have a big bag of tricks to track and profile customers.
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It’s funny you say this, I didn’t know that to be the case, but I guess I am not surprised. This is what Chrome’s incognito page says, and I never noticed the circled part before:
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Yeah, we have a pihole and a homegrown firewall which helps, but we haven’t resorted to more desperate measures. Some of it seems pretty much unavoidable. I don’t allow facebook or the like to install any apps on any devices, I never sign into accounts “using” google, facebook, etc., have all my privacy stuff as strict as possible, yada yada. But sheesh it’s a losing battle. I don’t bother with incognito unless (rare) I don’t want my activity to be remembered by my own device. I occasionally use a vpn, but mostly I’m too lazy.
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Besides, when you do login to buy the tickets, the airline might display a message that the fare has changed… happens occasionally with Alaska.
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“AI” is often a buzzword for anything done with computers. I’d like to see more specific details about what the “AI pricing” entails. I’m all for adjusting pricing based on dynamic market factors which could include things like number of available seats on a particular flight, demand for a particular flight, and special discounts for particular customers. Fixed pricing is far less optimal from a market/economics perspective. Of course there are some special situations that will need to be addressed, hence the proposal of starting on only a small minority of flights as a trial.
I always wonder - when I go to Kroger, they make me use digital coupons. They are such a pain.
I already sign in so why put an ‘extra’ discount tied to a difficult step ? Obviously there’s some intel tied to it.
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Dynamic pricing has been around for a long time, which is why airfares change from hour to hour, sometimes going up, sometimes down. But until now, these systems haven’t really factored in the specific characteristics of individual customers. That’s what appears to be changing with this new approach.
It essentially “stitches together” data from multiple sources to make personalized pricing decisions. For example, the algorithm might know that Phil lives in an affluent ZIP code, while Bruce is from a working-class neighborhood. It shows discounted fares to Bruce to keep him from defecting to a competitor, while predicting Phil will likely accept the higher fare.
Or it might know from tracking data that Lisa just shopped for a high-end designer handbag, so it decides it can quote $485 for a flight instead of $340.
And so on.
No wonder Delta is excited about the possibilities and is forecasting higher revenue in the future.
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Do you have a reference for this type of implementation? The Investor Day transcript at https://s2.q4cdn.com/181345880/files/doc_downloads/2024/11/CORRECTED-TRANSCRIPT_-Delta-Air-Lines-Inc-DAL-US-Investor-Day-20-November-2024-8_30-AM-ET.pdf describes it as
“And maybe a quick follow-up for Glen, because you did talk about AI pricing model. And I think you said you’re pricing 1% of the network today. Can you just maybe expand on that…?”
“Right now, it’s taking the role of a super analyst, it’s making decisions and recommendations based on working 24/7 to try and figure out what price points you can hold. And I think, it’s maybe even more important for Delta than other carriers because of the strength of our brand. We don’t really know where our brand strength in any individual market is maximized. So generally, we match our competitors’ fares and they may or may not be available. But if we take small increments and say to Tokyo, could we take a $20 increase in our fares and not see a decline in market share? Could we take a $40? It’s doing that real-time now.”
A friend who’s the co-founder of an AI startup that’s looking to build this kind of product.
It’s early stages so they don’t have a working product yet, but they have a lot of interest from airlines. (I don’t know which ones and I didn’t ask).
So I guess I should clarify that I can’t say whether Delta is aiming to use this kind of AI technology, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years they and other airlines do.